The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

by Nella Larsen

  “Yes, I’m still there. I’m assistant principal now.”

  Plainly it was a cause for enthusiastic congratulation, but Helga could only manage a tepid “How nice!” Naxos was to her too remote, too unimportant. She did not even hate it now.

  How long, she asked, would James be in New York?

  He couldn’t say. Business, important business for the school, had brought him. It was, he said, another tone creeping into his voice, another look stealing over his face, awfully good to see her. She was looking tremendously well. He hoped he would have the opportunity of seeing her again.

  But of course. He must come to see her. Anytime, she was always in, or would be for him. And how did he like New York, Harlem?

  He didn’t, it seemed, like it. It was nice to visit, but not to live in. Oh, there were so many things he didn’t like about it, the rush, the lack of home life, the crowds, the noisy meaninglessness of it all.

  On Helga’s face there had come that pityingly sneering look peculiar to imported New Yorkers when the city of their adoption is attacked by alien Americans. With polite contempt she inquired: “And is that all you don’t like?”

  At her tone the man’s bronze face went purple. He answered coldly, slowly, with a faint gesture in the direction of Helen Tavenor, who stood conversing gaily with one of her white guests: “And I don’t like that sort of thing. In fact I detest it.”

  “Why?” Helga was striving hard to be casual in her manner.

  James Vayle, it was evident, was beginning to be angry. It was also evident that Helga Crane’s question had embarrassed him. But he seized the bull by the horns and said: “You know as well as I do, Helga, that it’s the colored girls these men come up here to see. They wouldn’t think of bringing their wives.” And he blushed furiously at his own implication. The blush restored Helga’s good temper. James was really too funny.

  “That,” she said softly, “is Hugh Wentworth, the novelist, you know.” And she indicated a tall olive-skinned girl being whirled about to the streaming music in the arms of a towering black man. “And that is his wife. She isn’t colored, as you’ve probably been thinking. And now let’s change the subject again.”

  “All right! And this time let’s talk about you. You say you don’t intend to live here. Don’t you ever intend to marry, Helga?”

  “Someday, perhaps. I don’t know. Marriage—that means children, to me. And why add more suffering to the world? Why add any more unwanted, tortured Negroes to America? Why do Negroes have children? Surely it must be sinful. Think of the awfulness of being responsible for the giving of life to creatures doomed to endure such wounds to the flesh, such wounds to the spirit, as Negroes have to endure.”

  James was aghast. He forgot to be embarrassed. “But, Helga! Good heavens! Don’t you see that if we—I mean people like us—don’t have children, the others will still have? That’s one of the things that’s the matter with us. The race is sterile at the top. Few, very few Negroes of the better class have children, and each generation has to wrestle again with the obstacles of the preceding ones: lack of money, education, and background. I feel very strongly about this. We’re the ones who must have the children if the race is to get anywhere.”

  “Well, I for one don’t intend to contribute any to the cause. But how serious we are! And I’m afraid that I’ve really got to leave you. I’ve already cut two dances for your sake. Do come to see me.”

  “Oh, I’ll come to see you all right. I’ve got several things that I want to talk to you about and one thing especially.”

  “Don’t,” Helga mocked, “tell me you’re going to ask me again to marry you.”

  “That,” he said, “is just what I intend to do.”

  Helga Crane was suddenly deeply ashamed and very sorry for James Vayle, so she told him laughingly that it was shameful of him to joke with her like that, and before he could answer she had gone tripping off with a handsome coffee-colored youth whom she had beckoned from across the room with a little smile.

  Later she had to go upstairs to pin up a place in the hem of her dress which had caught on a sharp chair corner. She finished the temporary repair and stepped out into the hall, and somehow, she never quite knew exactly just how, into the arms of Robert Anderson. She drew back and looked up, smiling, to offer an apology.

  And then it happened. He stooped and kissed her, a long kiss, holding her close. She fought against him with all her might. Then, strangely, all power seemed to ebb away, and a long-hidden, half-understood desire welled up in her with the suddenness of a dream. Helga Crane’s own arms went up about the man’s neck. When she drew away, consciously confused and embarrassed, everything seemed to have changed in a space of time which she knew to have been only seconds. Sudden anger seized her. She pushed him indignantly aside and with a little pat for her hair and dress went slowly down to the others.

  Ninteen

  That night riotous and colorful dreams invaded Helga Crane’s prim hotel bed. She woke in the morning weary and a bit shocked at the uncontrolled fancies which had visited her. Catching up a filmy scarf, she paced back and forth across the narrow room and tried to think. She recalled her flirtations and her mild engagement with James Vayle. She was used to kisses. But none had been like that of last night. She lived over those brief seconds, thinking not so much of the man whose arms had held her as of the ecstasy which had flooded her. Even recollection brought a little onrush of emotion that made her sway a little. She pulled herself together and began to fasten on the solid fact of Anne and experienced a pleasant sense of shock in the realization that Anne was to her exactly what she had been before the incomprehensible experience of last night. She still liked her in the same degree and in the same manner. She still felt slightly annoyed with her. She still did not envy her marriage with Anderson. By some mysterious process the emotional upheaval which had racked her had left all the rocks of her existence unmoved. Outwardly nothing had changed.

  Days, weeks, passed; outwardly serene; inwardly tumultuous. Helga met Dr. Anderson at the social affairs to which often they were both asked. Sometimes she danced with him, always in perfect silence. She couldn’t, she absolutely couldn’t, speak a word to him when they were thus alone together, for at such times lassitude emcompassed her; the emotion which had gripped her retreated, leaving a strange tranquility, troubled only by a soft stir of desire. And shamed by his silence, his apparent forgetting, always after these dances she tried desperately to persuade herself to believe what she wanted to believe: that it had not happened, that she had never had that irrepressible longing. It was of no use.

  As the weeks multiplied, she became aware that she must get herself out of the mental quagmire into which that kiss had thrown her. And she should be getting herself back to Copenhagen, but she had now no desire to go.

  Abruptly one Sunday in a crowded room, in the midst of teacups and chatter, she knew that she couldn’t go, that she hadn’t since that kiss intended to go without exploring to the end that unfamiliar path into which she had strayed. Well, it was of no use lagging behind or pulling back. It was of no use trying to persuade herself that she didn’t want to go on. A species of fatalism fastened on her. She felt that, ever since that last day in Naxos long ago, somehow she had known that this thing would happen. With this conviction came an odd sense of elation. While making a pleasant assent to some remark of a fellow guest she put down her cup and walked without haste, smiling and nodding to friends and acquaintances on her way, to that part of the room where he stood looking at some examples of African carving. Helga Crane faced him squarely. As he took the hand which she held out with elaborate casualness, she noted that his trembled slightly. She was secretly congratulating herself on her own calm when it failed her. Physical weariness descended on her. Her knees wobbled. Gratefully she slid into the chair which he hastily placed for her. Timidity came over her. She was silent. He talked. She did not listen. He came at last to the end of his long dissertation on African sculpture, and Helg
a Crane felt the intentness of his gaze upon her.

  “Well?” she questioned.

  “I want very much to see you, Helga. Alone.”

  She held herself tensely on the edge of her chair, and suggested: “Tomorrow?”

  He hesitated a second and then said quickly: “Why, yes, that’s all right.”

  “Eight o’clock?”

  “Eight o’clock,” he agreed.

  Eight o’clock tomorrow came. Helga Crane never forgot it. She had carried away from yesterday’s meeting a feeling of increasing elation. It had seemed to her that she hadn’t been so happy, so exalted, in years, if ever. All night, all day, she had mentally prepared herself for the coming consummation; physically too, spending hours before the mirror.

  Eight o’clock had come at last and with it Dr. Anderson. Only then had uneasiness come upon her and a feeling of fear for possible exposure. For Helga Crane wasn’t, after all, a rebel from society, Negro society. It did mean something to her. She had no wish to stand alone. But these late fears were overwhelmed by the hardiness of insistent desire; and she had got herself down to the hotel’s small reception room.

  It was, he had said, awfully good of her to see him. She instantly protested. No, she had wanted to see him. He looked at her surprised. “You know, Helga,” he had begun with an air of desperation, “I can’t forgive myself for acting such a swine at the Tavenors’ party. I don’t at all blame you for being angry and not speaking to me except when you had to.”

  But that, she exclaimed, was simply too ridiculous. “I wasn’t angry a bit.” And it had seemed to her that things were not exactly going forward as they should. It seemed that he had been very sincere, and very formal. Deliberately. She had looked down at her hands and inspected her bracelets, for she had felt that to look at him would be, under the circumstances, too exposing.

  “I was afraid,” he went on, “that you might have misunderstood; might have been unhappy about it. I could kick myself. It was, it must have been, Tavenor’s rotten cocktails.”

  Helga Crane’s sense of elation had abruptly left her. At the same time she had felt the need to answer carefully. No, she replied, she hadn’t thought of it at all. It had meant nothing to her. She had been kissed before. It was really too silly of him to have been at all bothered about it. “For what,” she had asked, “is one kiss more or less, these days, between friends?” She had even laughed a little.

  Dr. Anderson was relieved. He had been, he told her, no end upset. Rising, he said: “I see you’re going out. I won’t keep you.”

  Helga Crane too had risen. Quickly. A sort of madness had swept over her. She felt that he had belittled and ridiculed her. And thinking this, she had suddenly savagely slapped Robert Anderson with all her might, in the face.

  For a short moment they had both stood stunned, in the deep silence which had followed that resounding slap. Then, without a word of contrition or apology, Helga Crane had gone out of the room and upstairs.

  She had, she told herself, been perfectly justified in slapping Dr. Anderson, but she was not convinced. So she had tried hard to make herself very drunk in order that sleep might come to her, but had managed only to make herself very sick.

  Not even the memory of how all living had left his face, which had gone a taupe-gray hue, or the despairing way in which he had lifted his head and let it drop, or the trembling hands which he had pressed into his pockets, brought her any scrap of comfort. She had ruined everything. Ruined it because she had been so silly as to close her eyes to all indications that pointed to the fact that no matter what the intensity of his feelings or desires might be, he was not the sort of man who would for any reason give up one particle of his own good opinion of himself. Not even for her. Not even though he knew that she had wanted so terribly something special from him.

  Something special. And now she had forfeited it forever. Forever. Helga had an instantaneous shocking perception of what forever meant. And then, like a flash, it was gone, leaving an endless stretch of dreary years before her appalled vision.

  Twenty

  The day was a rainy one. Helga Crane, stretched out on her bed, felt herself so broken physically, mentally, that she had given up thinking. But back and forth in her staggered brain wavering, incoherent thoughts shot shuttlelike. Her pride would have shut out these humiliating thoughts and painful visions of herself. The effort was too great. She felt alone, isolated from all other human beings, separated even from her own anterior existence by the disaster of yesterday. Over and over, she repeated: “There’s nothing left but to go now.” Her anguish seemed unbearable.

  For days, for weeks, voluptuous visions had haunted her. Desire had burned in her flesh with uncontrollable violence. The wish to give herself had been so intense that Dr. Anderson’s surprising, trivial apology loomed as a direct refusal of the offering. Whatever outcome she had expected, it had been something else than this, this mortification, this feeling of ridicule and self-loathing, this knowledge that she had deluded herself. It was all, she told herself, as unpleasant as possible.

  Almost she wished she could die. Not quite. It wasn’t that she was afraid of death, which had, she thought, its picturesque aspects. It was rather that she knew she would not die. And death, after the debacle, would but intensify its absurdity. Also, it would reduce her, Helga Crane, to unimportance, to nothingness. Even in her unhappy present state, that did not appeal to her. Gradually, reluctantly, she began to know that the blow to her self-esteem, the certainty of having proved herself a silly fool, was perhaps the severest hurt which she had suffered. It was her self-assurance that had gone down in the crash. After all, what Dr. Anderson thought didn’t matter. She could escape from the discomfort of his knowing gray eyes. But she couldn’t escape from sure knowledge that she had made a fool of herself. This angered her further and she struck the wall with her hands and jumped up and began hastily to dress herself. She couldn’t go on with the analysis. It was too hard. Why bother, when she could add nothing to the obvious fact that she had been a fool?

  “I can’t stay in this room any longer. I must get out or I’ll choke.” Her self-knowledge had increased her anguish. Distracted, agitated, incapable of containing herself, she tore open drawers and closets, trying desperately to take some interest in the selection of her apparel.

  It was evening and still raining. In the streets, unusually deserted, the electric lights cast dull glows. Helga Crane, walking rapidly, aimlessly, could decide on no definite destination. She had not thought to take umbrella or even rubbers. Rain and wind whipped cruelly about her, drenching her garments and chilling her body. Soon the foolish little satin shoes which she wore were sopping wet. Unheeding these physical discomforts, she went on, but at the open corner of 138th Street a sudden more ruthless gust of wind ripped the small hat from her head. In the next minute the black clouds opened wider and spilled their water with unusual fury. The streets became swirling rivers. Helga Crane, forgetting her mental torment, looked about anxiously for a sheltering taxi. A few taxis sped by, but inhabited, so she began desperately to struggle through wind and rain toward one of the buildings, where she could take shelter in a store or a doorway. But another whirl of wind lashed her and, scornful of her slight strength, tossed her into the swollen gutter.

  Now she knew beyond all doubt that she had no desire to die, and certainly not there nor then. Not in such a messy wet manner. Death had lost all of its picturesque aspects to the girl lying soaked and soiled in the flooded gutter. So, though she was very tired and very weak, she dragged herself up and succeeded finally in making her way to the store whose blurred light she had marked for her destination.

  She had opened the door and had entered before she was aware that, inside, people were singing a song which she was conscious of having heard years ago—hundreds of years, it seemed. Repeated over and over, she made out the words:

  “… Showers of blessings,

  Showers of blessings …”

  She was conscio
us too of a hundred pairs of eyes upon her as she stood there, drenched and disheveled, at the door of this improvised meeting house.

  “… Showers of blessings …”

  The appropriateness of the song, with its constant reference to showers, the ridiculousness of herself in such surroundings, was too much for Helga Crane’s frayed nerves. She sat down on the floor, a dripping heap, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  It was into a shocked silence that she laughed. For at the first hysterical peal the words of the song had died in the singers’ throats, and the wheezy organ had lapsed into stillness. But in a moment there were hushed solicitous voices; she was assisted to her feet and led haltingly to a chair near the low platform at the far end of the room. On one side of her a tall angular black woman under a queer hat sat down, on the other a fattish yellow man with huge outstanding ears and long, nervous hands.

  The singing began again, this time a low wailing thing:

  “Oh, the bitter shame and sorrow

  That a time could ever be,

  When I let the Savior’s pity

  Plead in vain, and proudly answered:

  “All of self and none of Thee,

  All of self and none of Thee.”

  Yet He found me, I beheld Him,

  Bleeding on the cursed tree;

  Heard Him pray: “Forgive them, Father”

  And my wistful heart said faintly,

  “Some of self and some of Thee,

  Some of self and some of Thee”

  There were, it appeared, endless moaning verses. Behind Helga a woman had begun to cry audibly, and soon, somewhere else, another. Outside, the wind still bellowed. The wailing singing went on:

  “‘… Less of self and more of Thee,

  Less of self and more of Thee.’”